everyday events are subject to perceptual ambiguity and its attendant variety of

everyday events are subject to perceptual ambiguity and its attendant variety of interpretations, mystical union is claimed to bring the existence and meaning of Absolute Reality into direct experience. This kind of knowing is more akin to the Platonic view of mathematics, that theorems have been everlastingly existent, from before our physical world, then it is to the here and now, physically based, finite computations involving the experimental machines of physics. The philosopher-mathematician father of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, criticized the physics-want-to-be orientation of the 1860 empirical, objective measure psychologies of Fechner and Wundt. He understood the best of their findings as simply correlations between subjective and observable events. Using mathematical discoveries as examples, Husserl spent his life arguing for the possibility of abstract truths relevant to mind being more reliable and valid if grasped via direct experience. Knowing by what the popular mid-twentieth century writer of science fiction, Robert Heinlein, called grocking it. This is antithetical to the attitudes of today’s human cognitive and brain sciences which disallow such knowing as deeply suspect unless accompanied by objectively definable observables such as changes in electrical or imaging indices of brain activity in one neural region or other. The modern psycholinguistics of brain mechanics can be _ called neolocationism. Using modern technology to measure regional blood flow, energy metabolism and/or electrovoltage or magnetic field activity, stories of function are spun that closely resemble those imagined more than a century ago by the first locationists, such as Ramon Cajal. These neuroanatomists spent thousands of hours looking at cell clusters and their connections in stained slides of human brain tissue using microscopes and imagined their singular and integrated function. Today, Lewis Judd, long time chairperson of the Department of Psychiatry at UCSD in La Jolla, carries a full sized, polymeric, three-dimensional model of the human brain when teaching his students about human subjective experience and interpersonal behavior. In his weekly grand rounds, he explains that day’s psychiatric patient’s problems pointing here and there at regions in this plastic surrogate for our electrical jellied brain. Few, if any, of the psychiatry students in his class was inclined to ask the foundational question: how it is that a finger point and 97 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013597